Evidence of meeting #88 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was owner.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My questions are for the Coast Guard, and for Mr. Lick particularly.
With regard to the process once a vessel has been declared a vessel of concern, or when it's something that people are interested in finding more about, what's the process for something like, say, the HMCS Cormorant, which is a vessel in my riding that has been at a wharf, has sunk, and has been raised? What would be the process for the community to get rid of that vessel?
Director General, Operations, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
I'll address the first part of your question.
As the minister already talked about, one part of our initiative is to prepare the inventory of all vessels of concern across the country and to prioritize them in terms of risk assessment, but a risk assessment that is broader than what we have had over the last number of decades, which involved just environmental and navigation hazards. The act will allow us to broaden that into tourism impact, economic impact, and that type of thing. That will help, in essence, deal with more vessels of concern to communities like yours.
In terms of the Cormorant, we are taking action, and we have taken action, to deal directly with the environmental risk, and we continue to deal with that as the vessel takes on more water. We continue to monitor it. That part of our actions we are taking now.
In terms of what the government has done, as part of the oceans protection plan, the government has provided the Coast Guard with some funding to deal with the technical assessments of what we consider the priority vessels of concern across the country. That's a very small list at this point in time, but it is getting us started on dealing with them.
We've dealt with the Manolis Lin terms of the technical assessment, and we're now taking action to get a contractor in place in the spring to deal with it.
We dealt with the Farley Mowat, and I'm very happy that we saw the thumbs-up on that one a little earlier in the year. The Cormorant is among those initial vessels for which we're going to take the funds to do a technical assessment, to look not just at the immediate environmental risk and what we have to deal with for that but also at how we deal with the vessel as a vessel of concern over the long term. It is already on the list.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
With regard to smaller vessels, we have an old fishing vessel in Woods Harbour that's at risk of sinking. The owner will not release it, so the municipal unit or the harbour authority could apply under the small boats program. Is there a way to force the owners to release the vessels or to deal with them if they're just not willing to do it?
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
There will be under this legislation.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Can you elaborate a little bit on what the process will be, so that going forward people can make sure that this ongoing problem stops?
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
Were the legislation in place right now, we would be able to notify the owner that they need to do something, tell them what they need to do, and give them a timeline for that. Then if they didn't do that within that timeline, we would have the capacity to move to administrative penalties or other measures to address the violation. We would then also have the ability to act to address the problem vessel by ourselves.
The act is structured precisely to not allow owners to choose to be irresponsible.
Liberal
Bernadette Jordan Liberal South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
One thing that still amazes me is that it's not illegal to do this right now. Up until now there's been no recourse for anyone to be held accountable when someone has chosen to leave a vessel for someone else to deal with.
If someone refuses to deal with an ongoing issue, have there been discussions about what types of fines or penalties will be in place for that? How do you go about collecting those? A lot of the time, these people seem to be very good at getting around the system, and I'm wondering how we address those kinds of problems as well.
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
The minister was talking before about how it won't require regulation to put it into effect, and that's because the administrative penalties and other penalties are hard-wired right into the legislation itself. The day that the legislation is effective, the enforcement regime is effective as well.
The penalties themselves are laid out quite clearly. There are two categories of offences: lesser offences that might be related to recording things, and then larger violations of not having taken action that's been required.
The AMPs have been set at levels that will serve as a deterrent, because we needed to make sure that the AMP regime was muscular enough to serve that deterrent function.
There is the possibility of jail time should there be a problem in collecting. A number of options are provided in the penalty regime, and the situation might require the use of different measures, depending on what type of violation and how the process is going.
Liberal
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses.
Who among you is the best for me to direct questions to about the state of the vessel registration system?
This is a major problem for us, at least on the west coast. I'm getting a lot of questions from local government leaders asking how you are going to send a fine or a bill to the owner of the vessel if you don't know who that owner is, and a lot of the problem vessels we have are pleasure craft.
I note this Transport Canada quote: “Improvements to vessel ownership identification systems linked to licensing of pleasure craft are not part of the proposed Bill”. How are you going to fix this?
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
Minister Garneau mentioned this morning that this bill is one piece of a national strategy on abandoned and wrecked vessels, and improving vessel owner information is a key part of that strategy.
When it comes to pleasure craft licensing, we have a couple of streams of activity. In the very short term, we're making some improvements to the national system and automating certain elements. Perhaps more importantly, we're working very closely with provinces and territories to look at how to benefit from their deep and wide experience on vehicle and other licensing to ensure that as soon as possible we can have a better system for accessing information about vessel owners.
This is recognized as a challenge, but we are actively working on the solutions. It's just outside the legislative framework.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
With respect, it's a major missing piece. The Canadian Maritime Law Association says that vessel registration is incomplete. Many ships in Canada cannot be linked to a specific owner. We had the ship-source oil pollution fund say, in a number of their annual reports, that in some situations involving abandoned and derelict vessels, the name of the shipowner is not readily available. They were only able to recover 2% of the funds they put out for dealing with abandoned vessel rescues because 25% of the owners were unfound or did not respond, not to mention that half of them are lacking financial assets.
Then the chief registrar of the Canadian Register of Vessels has no requirement to table an annual report and apparently has never reported on the bad state of the vessel registry.
I'm very concerned that the public not get overly invested in how great this legislation is going to be unless we have the confidence at the same time that the improvements to vessel registration, for pleasure craft as well as the larger boats, are happening in a parallel path. You're hearing that too. You must be.
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
Absolutely. I think it's important that committee members understand that there are two separate systems. There is the pleasure craft licensing system in Canada, and a large vessel registry.
With respect to the large vessel registry, I am not aware of as many problems as on the pleasure craft licensing side. We have just launched a study to look at the opportunities for improving the large vessel registry. Issues such as deregistration and other things are being looked at to ensure that the information contained in both those repositories is as robust as possible.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Another area I heard a lot about when I was in Nova Scotia this summer touring my legislation, but also on the west coast, is the number of federal vessels that are out there that have a Coast Guard logo on the front, or else they're old navy ships. I don't understand why this legislation doesn't include some kind of remedy, as Washington State does, to limit departments' and agencies' ability to sell these government assets as surplus to their requirements without putting conditions in place that ensure that the next owner actually has the means to deal with them responsibly. The Cormorant is a great example of that.
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
What I will say is that sometimes with federal assets it's not the first sale but the second or third sale that results in an issue. We're aware of the issue and are looking at ways to address it.
Director General, Operations, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
I will add one thing to that.
We recognize the problem, whether it's the ex-Tupper or other vessels like the Ricker, which we just recently decommissioned, and have yet to dispose of. As we go through the process, we're going to take stronger measures, stronger ownership, of not only just selling the asset but of thinking about who we are selling it to and whether we should actually sell it at all or whether we should have it dismantled in a more environmentally friendly way. We are taking action within the Coast Guard to be able to consider that more than just getting the money through a disposable asset.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
That's helpful. I just note for the committee's benefit that this is in Washington State's legislation and it's not in Transport Canada's proposed bill.
Liberal
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, again, to the witnesses.
What do other countries do? Do we have a sense of any best practices out there or any other nations that have a really good registration system and a more effective way of chasing down the owners of vessels?
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
We definitely do have quite a bit of information. We have done extensive research on what other countries are doing.
In many countries this is not done at the national level, as it is in the U.S. It's a combination of national and state legislation and programs that create their abandoned and wrecked vessel strategy, to the extent they have a coherent strategy. We have been looking not just at licensing and registration and best practices. I would note that our own provinces are quite expert in that area as well, and that's why we've been looking to them for their support.
However, we looked extensively at legislation and programs, particularly in Washington, Florida, and many of the coastal states in the U.S. Washington was of particular interest because of the similarity between their conditions and the conditions in B.C.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
I guess the question is whether anybody out there is doing a good job, in your estimation.
Director General, Environmental Policy, Department of Transport
We've looked at what's happening in Europe, we've looked at what's happening south of the border, and we have modelled a lot of what's proposed to be done through the national strategy on Washington and Florida.
Liberal
Ken Hardie Liberal Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC
Okay. Thank you.
With respect to some of the international-flagged ships, in our experience so far, are we dealing with vessels that are owned by shell companies, such that it would be almost impossible to find a person who would be responsible for that ship? The same sorts of transactions and cloaks and daggers that happen in a lot of other areas must be happening in the shipping business as well.
